Ice cream cone products, such as Cornetto™ are popular and well-known. These products typically consist of a wafer cone filled with ice cream on top of which sauces or pieces of biscuit, nut or fruit are dispensed to provide an attractive appearance. Consumers are continually looking for new eating experiences, and conventional cone products may be perceived as somewhat old-fashioned and uninteresting. For example, they contain relatively small amounts of sauce, which is normally on top of the ice cream. There is a need to design ice cream products that give the consumer a more indulgent and interesting eating experience for example having sauces and/or inclusions incorporated with the ice cream. However, it is difficult to incorporate significant amounts of materials with very different rheological properties to ice cream (e.g. sauces, cookie dough or inclusions) using current methods.
Individual products, such as tubs and cones containing inclusions, are often produced by a process wherein ice cream is dispensed into a mould, cone or tub, from a nozzle; then the inclusions are added from a separate feeder, and then a further layer of ice cream is dispensed from the nozzle to cover the inclusions. However this process does not distribute the inclusions throughout the ice cream, and moreover is slow and inconvenient on an industrial scale.
WO 88/02990 discloses a method of making a frozen confection in which ice cream is co-extruded with sauce into a cone thereby forming central column of the sauce which extends throughout the height of the product. However, only a narrow column (less than about 10 mm in diameter) can be produced in this way. Moreover, liquid fillings that have a high yield stress and viscosity or that contain large amounts of solid inclusions cannot be dosed in this way.
GB 1165448 discloses a nozzle for a soft-ice cream machine comprising a piston valve with a housing in which the piston is longitudinally movable to open and close the valve. The piston has a longitudinally extending passage which on one hand opens in the piston end surface located in the outlet opening of the nozzle, and on the other hand the passage opens in the circumferential surface of the piston. The housing has an aperture connected by a pump to a supply container for flavouring. When the valve is opened to discharge ice-cream, the opening of the passage in the circumferential piston surface is caused to register with the aperture in the housing connected to the supply container and hence the flavouring can be introduced into the ice-cream portion being discharged. Whilst this type of nozzle is suitable for flavourings such as syrups/jams, it is not suitable for fillings that have a high yield stress and viscosity or that contain large amounts of solid inclusions because of the likelihood of blockages.
Thus there remains a need for an improved method for producing frozen confection products which contain large amounts of sauce and/or inclusions.